From the moment he arrives at an elegant seaside hotel with his lover, Allan unsettles and obsesses the other guests. Elusive, equivocal, beautiful, he lives, gambles, swims and dances with a strange fierceness that they find intoxicating. Soon he even haunts their dreams. One by one, each guest is fatally drawn to Allan. And, as the hazy August heat fades and summer comes to an end, they gravitate towards self-destruction. Rich, lushly poetic, A Dark Stranger is a dreamlike portrayal of lives lived on the edge of the abyss.
"Gracq's position in modern French literature rests on his remarkable prose. He was one of the great stylists of his century, a writer with a carnal relation to words, capable of extraordinary and hallucinatory evocative power." - The Times
"Gracq is unique. His texts shine in the darkness of literature... Every page is a discovery and we are grateful for their beauty, their intelligence and their exoticism." - Libération
Julien Gracq (1910-2007) taught history and geography in various lycées. A close friend of André Breton, his work was inspired by German Romanticism, and combines startling imagery with a rich, precise metre. Staunchly avoiding the French literary scene-he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951-he is one of the few authors to have been published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade during his lifetime. He died in 2007 aged 97. Julien Gracq's Château d'Argol is also available from Pushkin Press.
From the moment he arrives at an elegant seaside hotel with his lover, Allan unsettles and obsesses the other guests. Elusive, equivocal, beautiful, he lives, gambles, swims and dances with a strange fierceness that they find intoxicating. Soon he even haunts their dreams. One by one, each guest is fatally drawn to Allan. And, as the hazy August heat fades and summer comes to an end, they gravitate towards self-destruction. Rich, lushly poetic, A Dark Stranger is a dreamlike portrayal of lives lived on the edge of the abyss.
Reviews
"Gracq's position in modern French literature rests on his remarkable prose. He was one of the great stylists of his century, a writer with a carnal relation to words, capable of extraordinary and hallucinatory evocative power." - The Times
"Gracq is unique. His texts shine in the darkness of literature... Every page is a discovery and we are grateful for their beauty, their intelligence and their exoticism." - Libération
Author
Julien Gracq (1910-2007) taught history and geography in various lycées. A close friend of André Breton, his work was inspired by German Romanticism, and combines startling imagery with a rich, precise metre. Staunchly avoiding the French literary scene-he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951-he is one of the few authors to have been published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade during his lifetime. He died in 2007 aged 97. Julien Gracq's Château d'Argol is also available from Pushkin Press.
